The Worst of My Dreamsby Lee Carrick

Genre:DramaSwearwords: A couple of strong ones.Description:When the Valium would have helped..._____________________________________________________________________The time on my imitation gold pocket watch read three in the morning and I was still awake. I’d been lying in the darkness of that room for two hours yet my mind refused to switch off and go to sleep; its times like that when I wish I had a switch behind my ear like the sleep button on a laptop. I just want to be able to drift off into the land of nod like normal people can. I was lying on a double air bed in the corner of my friend’s sitting room in a tenement in Pilrig, Edinburgh. I loved that room, it was as fake as the gold that covered my watch but it had character, it looked a little like the room on Oasis’ first album cover, Definitely Maybe. The floor was honey brown bare wood and littered with red wine stains. The old fire place spat soot out into the room as black as the cast iron it was made from. Beside it, placed against the wall, was a twelve inch Bob Dylan LP; we didn’t have a record player but Bob looked cool in the white hat and yellow cravat he was wearing and it was only two fifty from a charity shop in Stockbridge. To the left of the fire place was the book shelf, with five shelves within it. At the top were the books: Trainspotting, Filth, Acid House (two copies) and Ecstasy all by Irvine Welsh, The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road by Ian Banks, Treasure Island by Mr Stevenson and The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas. The second shelve held a brass bugle also procured from a second hand shop, it didn’t work but it sat proudly in the room and was the subject of many questions by new visitors to the house. On either side of the silenced instrument were movie cards, Thunderball on the left; Connery’s finest moment as bond and on the right Trainspotting; Scotland’s most famous film. The rest of the shelves were used to store old papers and magazines, piled up like propaganda skyscrapers and covering an old typewriter (charity shop) that had inked its last page long ago. The view from the room was uninspiring, it looked out onto a block of modern flats. Lifeless and beige, built with the imagination of a sitcom writer; a scar on the beautiful skin of Edinburgh. I hate them and the people who reside in them. Sales people, admin staff, junior accountants and marketers; the type of people who make wine bars insufferable. The room made me feel like Jack Kerouac or William S Burroughs; I was in a room with a difference, sleeping on the floor in a town I wasn’t from. The most striking thing about the room wasn’t what was in it, it was what wasn’t in it. We didn’t have a TV, visitors thought we were poor and couldn’t afford one. We were poor but we’d thrown the TV out in a moment of rebellion against the utter shite that was on it. So I lay there in this room. I knew why I couldn’t sleep, a recurring dream I was having at the time was scaring my conscious and subconscious enough to keep me awake all night sometimes. The neon blue Valium tablets I’d bought in India were all gone now, so I was left to natural sleep. By the time three thirty a.m. came, I was asleep. I feel asleep in 2011 and drifted off to 2021.The race wars had started in 2015. The White Workers Party (WWP), a political phoenix that was born from the ashes of the British National Party when it split following the assassination of Nick Griffin in 2013, took power of the UK after the terrorist attack in 2014. The Muslim Brotherhood had been elected into power in Egypt at the end of 2011 after the revolution there and immediately began to fund terrorist attacks against the west. The destruction of the Houses of Parliament on twelfth of February 2014 was their finest hour and drove UK citizens into a frenzy of racism, nationalism and patriotism that rivalled that of Cromwell’s Britain. The WWP rose to power very quickly on the promise of aggressive change and revenge. By the end of 2018 the UK was a whites only state and all Black or Asian people had either, fled, been imprisoned or been killed. The army had been used to devastating effect in levelling ethnic minority communities, destroying mosques and killing anyone who rebelled. The WWP were indiscriminate with their agenda; it didn’t matter if you were African Christians, Asian Buddhists or Caribbean Rastafarian. For them it wasn’t about religion, politics, morals or citizenship it was about being white or nothing. I had been a conscientious objector during the war and had been imprisoned in Franklin Prison in Durham for my views. Now the war was over, the power of the WWP was unrivalled and they were free to do as they saw fit. I was forced to work in the death fields, it was this or be killed; I am ashamed to admit that my fear of death was stronger than my morals, they were plateaus of dead people piled up like bags of rubbish at the dump. Trucks from all over the country would bring them to us to be incinerated. My job was to find people who were still alive so that they could be captured, imprisoned and tortured. Some of the ethnics would hide and play dead amongst the bodies in order to evade capture; we heard that they would feed on rotting flesh. A piece of cloth about four feet long was spun tightly around both hands as if you were trying to rinse the water from a wet towel. We were to hook the cloth beneath bodies we suspected as being alive and aggressively throw them into the air, if they were alive they’d scream with panic and we could capture them. The cloths were used as the WWP had made it a crime punishable by death for a white person to have physical contact of any kind with any other ethnic group. The vile people who volunteered for this job called the cloth a ‘nigger flipper’. If they tried to flee, we were to beat them over the head with a wooden club we carried; this was nicknamed the ‘wog log’. We were expected to bring in at least five people per week. There was a competition board in an office at the fields with the numbers that each individual worker had captured. It was a competition with a bonus payment at the end of each month for the top four workers. After six months of doing this, my soul had gone, I was a hollow vessel. I stopped feeling any shock, rage or emotion when I heard stories of the torture the people I captured underwent. I stopped feeling anything. I once heard that one of the prison officers favourite game was to tell the prisoners that if they used bleach to whiten their skin and pledge allegiance to the WWP they would be set free. Bottles of industrial strength bleach were provided to willing victims and they would scrub themselves in it until their skin was blistered and burned. They’d then be led to the front gates of the prison where they thought they’d be set free, the gates would open and on the other side a firing squad waited.I woke at ten in the morning back in 2011, sweating profusely, my gums sore and bleeding from the grinding of my teeth, and wondered what the fuck was going on in my head.

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About the Author

Lee Carrick is 25. Originally from Newcastle, he now lives in Edinburgh. His biggest passions in life are writing and travelling, and he likes to combine the two. He has been writing poetry since he was 15, but only recently began to write short stories and his first novel. He was inspired to write by Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory and Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors.Lee’s website can be found at http://leecarrick.weebly.com. His poetry can also be read at http://writers-network.com/members/carrick. And his blog is at http://scheemieintheroom.tumblr.com.